There are no shortage of ways you can record your PC screen or stream PC or console games to services like Twitch and Mixer, but that hasn't stopped Cyberlink getting in on the act with the latest version of its Screen Recorder application.
Screen Recorder 3 combines both of these features with a fairly robust video editor so that whatever the content you're capturing, you can handle every step inside the same application.
I've been playing with it for a little while and on the whole it's pretty good, but there are some areas that could be more streamlined and a few bugs still to work through.
Capture, record and edit
The meat of this application is being able to capture whichever video you want, be that from your PC or your games console using a capture card. There are various options for grabbing video from the PC, including a full-screen which will pull in everything, specific window selections or if you're capturing games or apps, Screen Recorder will detect these and pull it in automatically.
Other apps like OBS and XSplit can do all this, too, but Screen Recorder is a lighter, more minimal app, certainly in comparison to OBS. This can be looked at as good or bad, depending on your needs, but with small windows to set everything up, Screen Recorder basically just gets out of the way.
There are limitations, and while you can record at up to 120 FPS when capturing from a PC, you're limited right now to 1080p video and only three pre-determined bitrates between low, standard and high.
For folks who like to one-take their videos, Screen Recorder will also allow you to overlay a webcam as well as pull in audio from your microphone.
When you're done capturing there's a basic, but fairly robust video editor inside the deluxe version of the app. It's somewhat reminiscent of Cyberlink's Powerdirector video editor, but a much more basic version. You can add a bunch of special effects and transitions to your videos, trim, cut and render, and while it's far behind many other apps, the fact it's even here isn't a bad thing.
It's a decent little editor for beginners to get used to using before getting into more advanced video work.
Streaming
The other side to Screen Recorder is that with version 3, you can use it to stream your content to three services: Twitch, YouTube and Facebook (sorry, Mixer fans). As with everything else you can do with this app, set up and execution is pretty simple, but I do think it the process of streaming with this app could be improved.
The biggest issue I had in testing was that Screen Recorder wouldn't work for streaming if you had 2FA authentication on your Twitch account. Thankfully, I've been working with Cyberlink and the latest update has resolved the issue.
I'm also not so keen that there are tabs for record and stream in the app, but you have to setup everything on the record tab, such as your capture card and webcam. You then go to the stream tab to set your output resolution, frame rate and stream title before going live.
I also had a few issues getting sound from my Elgato capture card into Screen Recorder. This may be down to my particular audio setup, but I had to tell Screen Recorder to pull in audio from my Astro Mixamp to hear the games.
Niggles about setup aside, performance is great. Sure, only beginner streamers will probably get enough from this (you can't add overlays or custom alerts or anything), but it's not particularly resource intensive and produces a decent looking video. There's sadly no option to enable GPU encoding, which would be nice to have (I got some jittering when streaming 1080p60 with my CPU), but for the most part it's an easy way to successfully stream PC or console games.
The bottom line
For $40 for the standard package or $50 for the deluxe which includes the video editor, Screen Recorder 3 is fairly solid value considering its one time payment. More advanced streamers won't be swayed, but if you're looking for an easy to use tool for screen recordings that delivers excellent results and high frame-rates, it's well worth a look.
The streaming aspect is nice to have bolted on, and for those just testing the water it's a neat additional feature to have and in my experience, less resource intensive than other streaming apps.
Some of the overall process could be improved, and there's still a nasty bug with 2FA authentication to fix, but on the whole it's well-done application.
